Chapter 40 - Page 2

sphere of life and activity is opened; and the
companies bound to Canada and Nova Scotia are lured by tales of summer
suns, that ripen grapes in December. No word of war is breathed; hushed
is the clang of arms in these announcements; and the sanguine recruit is
almost tempted to expect that pruning-hooks, instead of swords, will be
the weapons he will wield.

Alas! is not this the cruel stratagem of Brace at Bannockburn, who
decoyed to his war-pits by covering them over with green boughs? For
instead of a farm at the blue base of the Himalayas, the Indian recruit
encounters the keen saber of the Sikh; and instead of basking in sunny
bowers, the Canadian soldier stands a shivering sentry upon the bleak
ramparts of Quebec, a lofty mark for the bitter blasts from Baffin's Bay
and Labrador. There, as his eye sweeps down the St. Lawrence, whose
every billow is bound for the main that laves the shore of Old England;
as he thinks of his long term of enlistment, which sells him to the army
as Doctor Faust sold himself to the devil; how the poor fellow must
groan in his grief, and call to mind the church-yard stile, and his
Mary.

These army announcements are well fitted to draw recruits in Liverpool.
Among the vast number of emigrants, who daily arrive from all parts of
Britain to embark for the United States or the colonies, there are many
young men, who, upon arriving at Liverpool, find themselves next to
penniless; or, at least, with only enough money to carry them over the
sea, without providing for future contingencies. How easily and
naturally, then, may such youths be induced to enter upon the military
life, which promises them a free passage to the most distant and
flourishing colonies, and certain pay for doing nothing; besides holding
out hopes of vineyards and farms, to be verified in the fullness of
time. For in a moneyless youth, the decision to leave home at all, and
embark upon a long voyage to reside in a remote clime, is a piece of
adventurousness only one removed from the spirit that prompts the army
recruit to enlist.

I never passed these advertisements, surrounded by crowds of gaping
emigrants, without thinking of rattraps.

Besides the mysterious agents of the quacks, who privily thrust their
little notes into your hands, folded up like a powder; there are another
set of rascals prowling about the docks, chiefly at dusk; 'who make
strange motions to you, and beckon you to one side, as if they had some
state secret to disclose, intimately connected with the weal of the
commonwealth. They nudge you with an elbow full of indefinite hints
and intimations; they glitter upon you an eye like a Jew's or a
pawnbroker's; they dog you like Italian assassins. But if the blue coat